For the tabloid editors responsible for giving celebrity stories the green light, they must have seemed like an unremarkable batch of moderate scoops.

Over a two-week period earlier this year, Amy Winehouse's hair was said to have caught fire, the enthusiasm of a member of pop group Girls Aloud for quantum physics was uncovered, and Pixie Geldof, the socialite and daughter of the anti-poverty campaigner Bob Geldof, was found padding out her bra with sweets.

If the stories seemed far-fetched, it was because they were part of a series of fabrications about celebrities ‑ made up and fed to tabloid newspapers by a documentary team that wanted to prove that journalists don't check facts.

Some of Fleet Street's top newsrooms ‑ including those of the Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express ‑ were duped in the hoax, which is contained in the film, Starsuckers, opening in cinemas across the country later this month.

Other celebrity victims of the project include the Canadian singer Avril Lavigne and the comedian Russell Brand.

"I wanted to show that celebrity journalism is nonsense and this has infected all parts of journalism," said Chris Atkins, the director of Starsuckers, which previews at the London Film Festival on 28 October. "I thought that quite a fun way to illustrate this was to see if we could invent some stories ‑ utterly fabricated stories ‑ and try to sell them to the newspapers."

The Guardian is previewing exclusive clips from the film. The footage shows how Atkins' team called the newsrooms of several daily tabloids posing as members of the public seeking to sell tabloids gossip about celebrities.

Atkins said he deliberately chose outlandish stories ‑ one printed in the Sun suggested that the director Guy Ritchie received a black eye while juggling cutlery ‑ that could be easily checked with a quick telephone call to a celebrity or their agent. He did not receive payment for the fake stories, but was offered up to £600 in return for the information.

Atkins and his team, who were Bafta-nominated for their last documentary, on civil liberties, have spent almost two years in the United States and eastern Europe exploring the psychology of fame culture. Their film is a polemic that attacks what it claims are attempts by media organisations to exploit celebrity.

The tabloid stunt, which forms one part of the film, was run from a small office in Brick Lane, east London. Using false names and telephone numbers, the documentary team said they did not give the tabloid reporters evidence to corroborate their stories, which typically appeared in the following day's edition.

The Daily Mail was the only newspaper that was approached by the filmmakers but did not print any of their fabrications. Only one fabricated story ‑ about an anarchist plot against Alan Sugar ‑ failed to make any newspaper.

When the stories were published, Atkins said they at times appeared with embellished details that he assumed had been added by reporters.

He said he was most concerned about how, once published, his fake stories spread across the internet "like wildfire", making unexpected appearances in media publications that seemed to have recycled the stories without first checking them.

This way their fake stories unintentionally popped up in publications as diverse as Cosmopolitan, the Scunthorpe Telegraph, New York Post, Turkish Weekly and Times of India. The Daily Express, Daily Star and Sun declined to comment on their publication of the fake stories.

Atkins argues in his film that tabloid newspaper stories about celebrities often contain serious inaccuracies, which, within hours, are picked up and republished across the media without corroboration.

"Stories that are not true spread across all news media, from the BBC to Channel 4 to the Guardian, I'm afraid to say, to all sorts of places where you expect responsible, serious, ethical journalism," he said. "They have now almost [all] been infected by the celebrity style of reporting, where everything is about entertainment, making people laugh and selling newspapers."